Upgrading

[drplokta]

I've pretty much decided to keep my 2 year 8 month old PowerBook until the Intel ones have come out and are looking stable, which I expect to be around the end of next year. But it's been falling behind the curve a bit, and I've made a few upgrades.

I took the memory from 512MB to 768MB, largely inspired by the printer driver for my newis HP Business Inkjet 1200 dtwn (a lovely printer) taking about 200MB of active memory when priting complex pages. Although it didn't help that I'd left the Visitor account logged in for a month or so -- sometimes Fast User Switching is a bit too transparent. And that helped performance a lot, especially while printing.

Then I got a new 80GB 7200 rpm hard disk to replace the 60GB 4200 rpm disk that it came with. I was always running up against disk space problems, and it was pretty slow. The new one works well and fast, but it does seem to take a bit more battery power and get a bit hotter than the old one.

And finally I bought a copy of Tiger and did a nice new clean install on the new disk, then copied on all my files (which I'd previously copied off onto my external Firewire disk -- shame it's hard to get external Firewire 400 enclosures for 2.5" laptop hard drives). It seems to be running smoothly, but I still have a fair amount of reconfiguring to do.

I also picked up one of these. Once I'm sure there's nothing left on the old disk that I need, I can stick it in this, reformat it and have a 60GB very portable network file server that also acts as a wireless access point and automatically downloads files from USB memory sticks or (with a suitable USB card reader, which I have) other memory cards. It's going to need some configuring to make it play nicely with my Airport Extreme basestation and Airport Express. Should be ready to take to Glasgow next week, where I expect it will come in useful.

Comments

[numbat.livejournal.com]

I saw the heading and at first I wondered if this was the geek way of describing improvements in your relationship.

[vampwillow]

lol!

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I would be very interested to hear how well this plays with OS/X.

(Plus it sounds like the McGuffin for a near-future thriller I'm pitching at my editor next week ...)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Can't see why it would be a problem, especially, it presumably works like any other network drive as far as the other computers on the network are concerned.

[drplokta]

It plays fine with OS X. I've got it fully working on my network, after a bit of fun getting WDS to work (I forgot I had to add the MAC address of the new box to the WDS client list on the master). I can browse to it and connect to it in Finder, I can ftp to it by IP address and I can connect a web browser to it by IP address (shame it doesn't support Rendezvous Bonjour, for which this is an ideal application). And yes, plug in a USB memory stick and it will suck it to disk automatically (unless it's a wide one; bad design means that the power connector stops you from connecting a wide USB memory key). So I now have a 60GB NAS box that can be accessed over wired or wireless networks that is smaller than a paperback book (although it needs a power supply; it doesn't have a battery).

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

if your old laptop hard disk is surplus to requirements could I buy it off you? (I wont be at Walkers tonight)

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Oh, it probably isnt spare. Sorry. Doh!